‘I was Mr Ambiguity,’ Abel said. ‘I used a contact of ours in East Berlin, somebody from their trade mission here in Paris, and a Russian in Brussels who seemed promising. And, Sam, a talkative friend on the other side in Vienna. Did you know?’
Sam was smiling. ‘Carry on.’
Abel said he had never suggested that he might be selling secrets, nor thinking of going over. ‘It was more difficult than that, in a way. I was the guy who could see their point of view, might even help them from time to time, but was never going to go all the way. The tempter. I was never going to betray, but I might be willing to deal. A trader in no man’s land.’
He described four trips to Berlin – ‘I wrote a letter to Mungo from there, probably shouldn’t have’ – and time in Brussels. ‘Your friend Jonny Hinckley, Will, was helpful.’ As for Vienna, he’d been attached for three months to the mission and had made contact with a Pole who was subsequently posted to Paris. ‘I found I had a little network of my own. I wasn’t buying secrets, and neither were they. But we were exchanging thoughts.’
‘Did we know?’ Flemyng asked, and looked at Sam.
His time come, Sam said that it was clear that he should say something about Freddy Craven. ‘I’ll tell you all now that I was able to help him a little when this whole business started. When Sandy Bolder started stomping around, he rang me in Vienna. Then Freddy was on the trail, wanted help, and I sniffed around. And, Abel, I picked up your tracks. Your Pole – well, he was a friend of mine, too. A bit of a tart, I’m afraid – everybody had a piece of him. Freddy wondered if you’d been seen around town, and I could say that you had. So suddenly, I was just about the most popular man on the circuit.
‘Freddy was the person on our side who’d started this whole operation. But it passed out of his hands when he left Berlin, and I guess that these days there’s a little group of people in London who’re on board with you, Abel, and keeping this show on the road. Am I right?’
Abel and Flemyng were contrasts. From his chair, Flemyng seemed to Maria to be glowering. Abel was evidently happy, and told Sam that he was bang on the money.
‘I can say no more.’ Laughing.
Maria raised her glass. ‘Allies.’
Flemyng rose for the first time since the conversation had started. ‘I’ve learned a lot. Thank you. But where does it get us with Quincy?’
‘I’d rather start with your friend Kristof,’ Abel said, ‘because he’s going to lead us to her.’
His three listeners settled down, Flemyng back in his chair, his expression sullen. Abel was sprightly, speaking without hesitation and turning the story into a drama. His hands were mobile and his eyes alive. Before he started, he stood up and they all recognized that he was going to give a performance.
‘Before you arrived at the bar this afternoon, Will, I showed a picture of Quincy to the grumpy guy who runs the place.’
Flemyng said, ‘Pascal.’
‘The same. He recognized her, said she’d been there at least twice in the last month. To meet our friend, obviously. They were in touch. Who started it, we’ve no way of knowing. But she wasn’t going to that bar to have fun. She was getting something, because that was her business. The only one she knew. Kristof was helping her, must have been. She told both of you’ – he looked at Maria and then his brother – ‘that she had a big story about the East Germans, and she had.
‘The trouble is, it was too big. She was better than any of them thought. After all, she was the kind of person that’s completely foreign to them. Star reporter, glamour-puss, clever as can be and just as ruthless. Over time, she’d picked up stuff on both sides of the wall, in Vienna, here in Paris and in Brussels. Kristof, maybe a little bit dazzled like all of us, had helped a little. But it had all gotten out of control, and someone panicked.’
Sam asked him to explain what convinced Abel that she knew too much.
‘In the end, the list. It was hers, of course. They weren’t passing it to her. She was telling them what she knew. Must have had someone who had offered to confirm it.’
Flemyng stood up. ‘The most dangerous game of them all.’
Abel said, ‘Sure. It’s why I said I’d start with Kristof. She thought he’d turned against his own people, and suspected he just might stand up her information. Certainly she thought he wouldn’t betray her, so there was nothing to be lost. She would have told him already that she had a list of names, but he hadn’t got far enough down the road to play that game. He may have fooled around with her, but he wasn’t ready for that stuff to come out. Both of them had swum out of their depth. She was revealing how much she knew; he was consorting with a woman who he probably suspected was in touch with us too. We confirmed that to him in the bar today, and we all saw his reaction. It wasn’t shock, it was the sight of a nightmare come true. She didn’t know how much danger they were in. He did.
‘Quincy had excited them – probably passing some stuff she’d learned in her dealings with our man Zak Annan. Anything for a story. Zak was sure she’d wandered off the reservation, and was trading information. Name by name, she put together that list. People that have some significance, for reasons we don’t yet know. When Kristof and his lot realized that the point of all her coming and going between us and them was to write it up in a magazine, they had to stop her. Simple as that.’
Flemyng was still. Speaking softly, so that Maria had to come closer to hear him, he said that Abel’s story pointed to one conclusion. ‘Kristof was responsible for her death.’
‘I think so,’ his brother said. ‘I don’t know whether it was him, or whether he caused someone else to do it, but the decision was his.’
They watched Flemyng get up again, this time without the hint of anger that had marked him since they started. He was alert, excited, and his voice had risen. ‘You realize what this means?’ he said.
‘I think I do,’ said Maria.
She went on. ‘He will have known, when she was killed, that she had left the list in the dead letter box. But they’d never leave it nearby – the very information that they killed her to protect.’
‘Exactly,’ Abel said.
Flemyng was standing beside Maria. ‘And we remember what happened on the night of Quincy’s death. Kristof told us where to find the dead letter box.’
‘And the list,’ she said.
‘I love it,’ said Sam.
‘Oh yes,’ Abel said. ‘He wanted you to have it. I’ve been practising ambiguity this last year or two. Your friend Kristof is a past master at the same game.’
‘Which means,’ said Flemyng, ‘that we can’t know if these names are a gift…’
‘… or siren voices luring us to the rocks,’ said Maria.
THIRTY-FOUR
When Flemyng rang Craven’s apartment early the next morning, Declan O’Casey answered the phone.
‘Will Flemyng, a pleasure.’
Flemyng said, ‘You answered Sam’s summons. Be honest with me about Freddy.’
‘It’s not good, but even a garrulous old medic like me prefers not to talk about such things on the phone. Freddy’s having a wee snooze. You know the café on his corner, I take it. Half an hour?’
And from the doctor who had listened to his own heart and taken some of his blood only a month before in his annual check-up, he learned that the previous evening O’Casey had decided to go to the flat soon after he arrived from Orly, and found the old man in a daze. He’d gone into a deep sleep soon afterwards and the first time O’Casey had rung in the morning there was no reply. At the second attempt he got through, and found Craven lucid, but weary and slow.
‘I’ve examined him as best I can. He won’t hear of hospital, although I tried. Says it’s been a busy time, too much travelling, and he’s exhausted.’
Flemyng didn’t interrupt, knowing there was more.
‘I’ll tell you alone, Will. Be sure that I won’t go to the embassy – Freddy forbids it – and I’ll leave you boys to deal with London. I told him
two days ago that I thought he’d had what you’d call a heart attack. Small, but telling, and not for the first time. You know that with everything he’s got inside – or hasn’t, I should say – he’s weaker than he was. There’s been a decline. And overnight… well, I think something else has happened. I’ll let him get up, but if he doesn’t stay put in that bloody chair I’ll have him in hospital, whatever he says. I’d like to be straight with him and avoid the embassy. Who’s chancery now?’
‘Pierce Bridger.’
‘Oh God.’
‘Can I ask,’ Flemyng said, ‘whether I can come round? There’s an urgent matter we should talk through. I’ll try not to tire him. He’d be surprised if I didn’t want to see him, I’m sure.’
‘I’d prefer to be there,’ O’Casey said.
‘Not in the room, I’m afraid. You understand why.’
‘Sure. But not far away. Come at noon.’
Flemyng took to the streets. He told Janet that he was going to look at the latest damage in the Latin Quarter, and would ring in the afternoon. She said that Sandy was beetling about, and all would be well. ‘Mr Bridger was disappointed that neither you nor Mr Craven could come round yesterday afternoon. I think he’ll want to reconvene. Mr Bolder was agitated, I’m afraid.’
‘Let him stew, Janet,’ Flemyng said and put down the phone. Feeling the guilt, he knew that Janet, who understood his moods, would play his hand for him.
He walked along the river. The spring sunshine brought home to mind. Mungo loved the moments at Altnabuie when one season turned into the next, and the slow coming of spring was one of the thrills of the Highlands that he savoured every year. Flemyng remembered long walks up the glen, where the broom and the hawthorn were coming into flower and carpeting the hillside with colour. The burn swollen with spring rain, and the woods fresh with new growth. There was always a mild wind in early May; the last April storms were gone, and the light on the hills began to wash the landscape in colours that foretold the summer months. He longed for it.
Craven had spoken of his exhilaration when he come back from his trip to see Mungo, but Flemyng had caught the valedictory tone. He didn’t expect to see Scotland again.
Then he forced himself to abandon the meditation. Craven was tired, and even if O’Casey suspected an episode he would be ready to receive him at noon. Until then, he would walk.
But Kristof was in his mind, and Abel. The pain of the evening conversation had stayed with him through the night. In the early hours, he’d risen and, sitting in the chair, wondered whether he could have avoided the question; let Abel tell it in his own way. No. They knew the rules, and they were bound to follow them. Maybe condemned. There was never an escape from that.
At about eleven he was in rue de Tournon, a battleground. Someone had tried, and failed, to uproot a lamp post that now jutted into the street like a piece of field artillery. There was a barricade near the café which had reached a height of about four feet, with rocks and scrap metal and, he was astonished to see, a tree trunk. Two trucks with riot police were parked end to end at the corner, and a student shouted at them as he passed. Slogans covered the walls.
‘Sous les pavés, la plage’ on a hoarding above a stockpile of cobblestones, ready for the fight that everyone said was coming tomorrow. At one corner the police had hung a green canvas over a barricade, to conceal it, and he saw a message splashed across it in white paint that made him laugh for the first time that morning, ‘Je suis Marxiste, tendance Groucho.’
A familiar figure was sitting at a table outside a café in the parallel street. Edward Abbott was writing, as usual, his head down. Flemyng took a seat beside him.
‘On patrol?’
Flemyng said, ‘What do you hear?’
‘The same as you, no doubt. Strike tomorrow. A march. They’ve occupied a factory in Toulouse, apparently, and they think that’s the start of something. We were in flames in these parts last night. Remarkable. Maria Cooney was here.’
‘Really?’ Flemyng said. ‘Quite an operator.’
‘Yes, talking about Grace Quincy again.’
‘And?’ said Flemyng.
‘I think she’s got a story about her. I’d like to get it first.’
‘If I can help, I’ll ring.’ Flemyng said he had an appointment and waved goodbye.
He got away from the battle zone and found a taxi. A few minutes later he was at Craven’s building.
The old man came to the apartment door. He was dressed in his Paisley pattern dressing gown, and Flemyng could see O’Casey behind. He shook hands with the doctor, who said he’d be in the kitchen if he was needed for anything.
As they sat down, Craven in his high easy chair and Flemyng on the sofa, he noticed that he had lost his interest in pretence. ‘I’m fading, Will. Declan talks about “episodes” . I know what that means. I’m running out of steam, and quickly.’
Flemyng said, ‘I don’t want to tire you, but we must talk.’
‘I agree.’
Flemyng explained how the four of them had come to meet on the previous day, and how Sam had been introduced to some of the events that together had troubled them.
‘Quincy?’
‘He knows everything, and much more than I knew until last night. Did you know she was playing on both sides of the street, after a fashion?’
Craven said, ‘When we realized she was sending and receiving envelopes at the cemetery I thought to myself that it was unlikely she was first taught how to do that by a Russian, far less an East Berliner. Not her style. So I thought it was a good old American boy who got her involved in the first place. Sam was able to help. There were whispers about her in Vienna – stay clear. She was somebody’s, but whose nobody knew. That kind always come unstuck in the end.’
‘Time and fate,’ Flemyng said. ‘The agent’s lot.’
Craven was tiring, but Flemyng had to press him.
‘Despite all that’s happened, we’re still trying to understand Kristof’s threat, the beginning of this whole affair. If we’re going to know what he might do next that’s the first step. But I still don’t understand why. I know you can help.’
‘Know?’
‘Suspect, then.’
‘That’s better, my boy. I certainly can.’
His old friend rose. It took an effort for him to cross the room but he wanted to look in charge, captain of the ship, and not a shaky figure curled up in a chair.
‘From the start, you’ve wondered about his history. His travels, his origins. The story that he carries on his back, like all of us, because he gave you nothing. You were right to be puzzled. I can help.’
Flemyng’s senses were sharp. He felt ready to spring, his energy about to be released.
‘You were intrigued by his language and his style. His ease with our ways, and his understanding of them.’
‘I couldn’t place him.’
‘The explanation is easy,’ Craven said, smiling in a way that caught Flemyng’s heart. ‘The simplest one of all.
‘Kristof is as English as I am.’
THIRTY-FIVE
Berlin, city of secrets.
Flemyng’s closeness to Craven was rooted in their first forays in its streets, where he had learned his trade and the joys of observation. They laughed together, sometimes schemed, Flemyng absorbing the satisfaction of an older man who saw reflected in a young friend the pattern of his own life, the thrills and the sadness. In the hours that followed the unmasking of Kristof, that commitment in Flemyng was renewed. It would never be broken.
Craven enjoyed the first shock on his face.
He was sparkling for a moment, calling through the kitchen door for some tea from O’Casey, and settling Flemyng down for a piece of vintage storytelling. ‘I wish we could raise a glass. He won’t let me.’
Kristof.
‘I had no idea,’ Flemyng said. ‘Why didn’t I think of it?’
‘Everything pointed the other way,’ said Craven. ‘How he behaved, and the look of
him. The threats. You thought his English had been taught, and that’s our old failing. We think they are rather better at it than they are. I don’t care, by the way. I’m lighting up.’
O’Casey brought the coffee and found Craven laughing in a plume of smoke.
‘No point now, Declan. Let it go.’ The doctor left the room, closing the door behind him.
‘I have a confession to make to you,’ Craven said. ‘And you to me, no doubt.’
Flemyng acknowledged that it was true.
‘I’ll go first,’ Craven said. ‘I don’t think it would have changed the course of events, but I could have told you that I knew who Kristof was. But it had to play out… naturally, if you follow me. I didn’t want you putting on an act. You’re good, Will, but he’d have spotted it.’
He took him back to Berlin, and their expeditions together when Flemyng was young and easy. Craven was looking for recruits on the other side, lines he could run into the eastern sector. A policeman, a nurse, a student – no matter, any link had promise. One day he heard a story – ‘it was Tommy Critchley, before your time and long gone from us, who picked up a whisper. There was a young Englishman who’d left home after school, ran away. Good family and so on. They had a letter from him, from Berlin of all places, but the wrong side of the city. He’d had a conversion, religious-style, but with him it was politics. They couldn’t believe it – burned the letter, of course – but it was true.
‘Critchley knew one of the uncles, who had dealings with us in Hong Kong after the war. Whole thing hushed up. You can understand it, embarrassment beyond measure.
‘So he was lost to the world, and not spoken of again. Word went out that he’d been travelling and had an accident. Terrible for the family, sadness all round, but time moved on. They guarded their secret guilt. The parents are dead now, but there are brothers and sisters. One, at least, in the public eye.
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